Treason of the Intellectuals, Volume 3

Treason of the Intellectuals

Treason of the Intellectuals was the title of a 1928 book by Julien
Benda,
originally published in French as La Trahison des Clercs. The term Clerc
has an obvious similarity to the word cleric, and Benda used it in the
sense of people who devoted their lives to ideas and thought without necessarily
being concerned with practical applications. Benda was distressed at the way
intellectuals of the early 20th Century had been increasingly seduced by the
appeal of power, and by the possibility that men of ideas might have a real role in
shaping human events. Some devoted their energies to justifying nationalism,
others to fanning class rivalry. One group would soon furnish an intellectual
basis for fascism, the other had already been swept up by early Marxism, dazzled
by the Russian Revolution. Benda warned that if these political passions were
not reined in, mankind was "heading for the greatest and most perfect war
the world has ever known."

Society and intellectuals had been jointly responsible for this process.
Particularly in Germany, universities had been redefined as institutions for
producing skilled scientists and engineers, and the increasing success of
science and technology in producing practical results had led to a shift from a
belief in knowledge as good in itself to knowledge as good for practical
purposes. Universities discovered that people who doled out money grudgingly for
abstract knowledge were quite happy to spend money for knowledge with practical
uses. The intellectuals of whom Benda wrote had aspirations of being
philosopher-kings. Not philosopher-kings in the ancient sense, kings who used
the insights of philosophy to rule more wisely and justly, but philosophers who also happened to
be kings and who would be able to use the power of the state to advance their
own philosophical agendas (and presumably quash opposing views).

Volume II: Marxism

Volume II, of course, would be a study of the way Western
intellectuals prostituted themselves to Communism during the Stalinist era and
the Cold War.
Innumerable books on this subject have been written. Most of those of Cold War
vintage were derided as mere anti-Communist hysteria or, ironically,
"anti-intellectual." Norman Podhoretz' Breaking Ranks is a
recent account of how one former radical came to be disillusioned. Mona Charen's
Useful Idiots has generated shrill screams of rage from leftist
intellectuals.

When I was growing up (some people argue that using the term "growing
up" in any context involving me is a contradiction in terms, but never
mind) in the 1950's, I got a fairly standard view of the horrors of Communism.
By the mid 1960's, I had come to regard a lot of that information as mere
propaganda. Then, early in my college career at Berkeley (1965-69, no less) I
got a revelation. I was browsing in the library stacks and came across a section
on Soviet history. I discovered that everything I had been taught to regard as
propaganda was in fact true, and moreover, the documentation was massive and
easy to find. Then I read Aleksander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago and
discovered that what I had been told in the 1950's wasn't the whole truth. The
reality was far worse. Only the most massive and willful denial of
reality could have accounted for the mind-set of Western intellectuals.

The Soviet Union is gone, and while nominal Communism lingers in Cuba, China,
Vietnam and North Korea, Communism as a global magnet for intellectuals is gone.
One preposterous claim, seriously advanced by some intellectuals, is
that they played a role in the downfall of Communism, when in fact they
obstructed and ridiculed opposition to Communism at every turn. But surely the most
wonderful irony is that the CIA set up front foundations during the Cold War to fund leftist intellectuals
and thereby provide an alternative to Marxism. Bertrand Russell, the
archetypical anti-Western Cold War intellectual, was actually covertly
subsidized by the CIA. I love it. Russell, to me, symbolizes
everything that made the Twentieth Century a scientific golden age and a
philosophical desert, a thinker whose reputation was based solely on his own
hype machine. With his colossal ego, he never for a moment suspected
that his funding was anything other than richly deserved. The irony is
beautiful.

Volume III: Islamic Fascism

But a new magnet for intellectuals is emerging: radical Islam. It's not that intellectuals are likely
to embrace radical Islam themselves anytime soon - for one thing, the
requirement of believing in God would deter many of them. But what they can do
is obstruct efforts to combat radical Islam and terrorism, undermine support for
Israel, stress the
"legitimate grievances" of radical Islamists, and lend moral support
to the "legitimacy" of radical Islamic movements.

This is a phenomenon at first glance so baffling it cries out for analysis. Both fascism and
Marxism censored, harassed, and imprisoned intellectuals, but they also gave lip
service to intellectualism. Russia and Germany both had great universities. Both
fascism and Marxism appealed to their respective nations' cultural heritage in
support of their ideologies. Our mental picture of fascism is now mostly colored
by images of Nazi book burnings and bad art, but before World War II fascism was
quite successful at passing itself off as a blend of socialism and nationalism.

Marxism in
particular offered an intellectual framework that many intellectuals bought
into. Marxism presented a facade of support for culture and science, paid intellectuals highly and created huge academic institutions.
True, intellectuals in the Soviet Union were well paid mostly in comparison to
the general poverty of everyone else rather than in real terms, the
economy was so decrepit that the money couldn't purchase much of value, and a lot
of the academic institutions were second-rate in comparison to any American
community college, but at least the Soviet Union could put forth an illusion of
fostering intellectual inquiry. (I once sent a letter to the Soviet Embassy
inquiring about films on the Soviet space program. This was after
word-processors had become universal in American offices. I got a reply - a couple
of years later - typed on
a manual machine that looked as if Lenin had typed his high school term papers on
it, and the embassy was still using the same ribbon.) But radical Islam is openly hostile to
intellectual inquiry. Iran under the Ayatollahs banned music. In the United
States, the work Piss Christ ignited a fierce debate - not over
whether such work should be allowed, but whether it should be publicly
supported. In parts of the Islamic world, dissident works invite not debate
over public funding, but death sentences.
Fascism and Marxism at least offered the illusion that they supported
intellectual inquiry. Radical Islam offers intellectuals nothing. So
why aren't Western intellectuals whole-heartedly behind any and all diplomatic
and military attempts to combat radical Islam?

What Made Treason I and II Tick

Wrong End of the Telescope

Most people have a tendency to forgive excesses committed in the name of some
cause they support. They either regard them as unfortunate misdeeds by aberrant
individuals, or as necessary evils in the name of some higher good. That is, of
course, if they admit them at all. Very few things were more bizarre than the spectacle of free-love advocates
in the Sixties extolling the virtues of Marxism, which had produced some of the
most prudish, repressed and sexually ignorant societies in history.

Denying the mass murders of Marxist regimes is on exactly the same
intellectual level as denying the Holocaust, and I never met any intellectuals
who denied that Marxist societies were pretty oppressive. Still, I recall being
on a panel that attempted (for the gazillionth time) to redefine general
education. One panelist suggested that students should have exposure to
Holocaust literature. I suggested that the Gulag Archipelago might be a
worthy addition to the list (unlike any other members of the group, I had
actually read it.) Oh, nononononononononoNO, he replied, that wasn't at
all the same.

Social misfits defected to the Soviet Union; intellectuals,
regardless of how much they lionized Marxism in the comfort of their living
rooms, for some reason or other almost
never did. But when confronted with questions about the atrocities of Marxism,
they came back with a standard litany of Western sins: racism, support for
oppressive anti-Communist regimes, poverty, inequality, and so on. The faults of Marxist regimes were on a completely different scale than those of
the West, and a lot of apparent "social justice" in Marxist
societies looked good at the time but turned out to be smoke and mirrors. The nomenklatura
or Party elite were as entrenched as any Western plutocrats, the "free
medical care" was primitive, and their environmental record was atrocious.

The Seduction of Efficiency

Nobody can deny that American society has some severely messed up values. Why
would a society that is based on science and technology frequently pay an
inventor less than the lawyer who draws up the patent papers? What rational
society would pay Shaquille O'Neal millions of dollars for skills that, shorn of
the hype, amount to bouncing a rubber ball, and pay a teacher far less?

Surely we could eliminate such absurdities by putting the decision-making
process in the hands of an informed leadership. Of course, to know what
decisions to make, you need to know what will work - you need a ruling theory.
Both Marxism and fascism were happy to supply them.

The problem was that the decisions weren't very good in practice. Both
systems excluded talented individuals for purely ideological reasons. People
tended to twist the system to their own short-term advantage or take the path of
least resistance. A commonly cited example was that of a Soviet factory that
made nails. If their production goal was defined in terms of weight, they turned
out large nails. If it was determined in terms of number, they turned out tiny
nails. The one thing they didn't do was turn out the variety and quantity of
nails people actually needed.

In Western democracies, even in the U.S. where the hostility to regulation is
greatest, there is a vast amount of central decision-making, but day to day
decisions are left to market forces. A lot of the regulation - everything from
bolt threads to type fonts - is carried out by tens of thousands of
standardization agreements worked out by the industries involved. The solutions
that arise aren't always optimal, but they usually end up being workable.
After two decades of fumbling, we have settled on a de facto standard for
computer operating systems. It has imperfections - some serious - but it
generally works. Imagine being saddled with a computer architecture defined by
some central planning committee in 1983. At about that time, someone in the U.S.
Government realized with horror that all the standardization agreements
mentioned above were being made and enforced with no government oversight.
So the Government convened some hearings. The unanimous consensus, even by Ralph Nader, was that attempting to regulate this process was an invitation to chaos.

Putting the decision-making process in the hands of an informed leadership
sounds attractive but it more often than not ends up being less efficient that
the trial-and-error consensus process of Western democracies. And when you think
about it, the standardization agreements I've discussed are
decision-making by an informed leadership. In fact, they are
decision-making by the informed leadership.

Denial

One of the biggest mysteries about Marxist societies, to me, was why they
persistently purged technologists when they came to power. All technologists
want, more than anything else, is to be left alone to do their jobs. Had Marxist
governments freed their technological elites from bureaucratic interference,
they would have created the most rabidly loyal supporters imaginable.

Unfortunately, technologists have one gaping weak spot. They believe the
data. And with their technical expertise, they are in a position to say
authoritatively that some ideas simply will not work. Communism, which more than
any other political system was based on crackpot conspiratorial thinking and
pseudointellectualism, simply could not tolerate that.

Hatred of Democracy

When we try to discover what fascism, Marxism, and radical Islam have in
common, the field shrinks to a single common theme: hatred of democracy. Despite all the calls for
"Power to the People" from radical intellectuals, the reality is that no
societies have ever empowered so many people to such a degree as Western
democracies.

The problem is that people in democratic societies usually end up using that
empowerment to make choices that intellectuals hate. How can we reconcile the
fact that the masses, whom intellectuals profess to support, keep making wrong
choices? I've got it - they've been duped somehow. Those aren't their real
values; they've been brainwashed into a "false consciousness" by society. If
they were completely free to choose, they'd make the "right" choices. But of
course we have to eliminate all the distractions that interfere with the
process: no moral or religious indoctrination, no advertising or superficial
amusements, no status symbols, no politically incorrect humor. "False
consciousness" is a perfect way of professing support for the masses while
simultaneously depriving them of any power to choose; a device for being an
elitist while pretending not to be.

The post-Soviet version of "false consciousness" is
"internalized oppression." If you're a woman who opposes abortion, a
black with middle class values, or a person with a lousy job who nevertheless
believes in hard work, those aren't your real values. You've internalized
the values of the white male power elite and allowed yourself to become their
tool. You don't really know what you believe. When the enlightened elite want
your opinion, they'll tell you what it is.

Democracy confronts radical intellectuals with a threat more dangerous than
any censor, secret police, or religious fatwa - irrelevance. An
intellectual working on behalf of a totalitarian regime can imagine himself as
an agent of sweeping social change. If he ends up in a labor camp or facing a
firing squad he can at least console himself that his work was so seminal that the only
way the regime could cope with it was to silence him. He made a difference.
A radical intellectual in a democracy, on the other hand, finds the vast
majority ignoring him. They never heard of him. His most outrageous works go
unknown or are the butt of jokes. He watches in impotent rage as the masses
ignore art films and go to summer blockbusters. Worse yet, things that are
noticed get co-opted, watered down and trivialized. Works that are supposed to
shake the System to the core are bought by fat cats to decorate corporate
headquarters or stashed in bank vaults as investments. Fashions that scream
defiance of everything the society holds dear end up being the next generation's
Trick or Treat costumes. Protest songs end up being played on elevators twenty
years later.

Eric Hoffer, the longeshoreman-philosopher, nailed it perfectly:

The fact is that up to now a free society has not been good for the
intellectual. It has neither accorded him a superior status to sustain his
confidence nor made it easy for him to acquire an unquestioned sense of
social usefulness. For he derives his sense of usefulness mainly from
directing, instructing, and planning- from minding other people's business-
and is bound to feel superfluous and neglected where people believe
themselves competent to manage individual and communal affairs, and are
impatient of supervision and regulation. A free society is as much a threat
to the intellectual's sense of worth as an automated economy is to the
workingman's sense of worth. Any social order that can function with a
minimum of leadership will be anathema to the intellectual.

We can see the hatred of democracy most clearly in criticisms of the economic
world. We
hear that the
automobile creates pollution and urban sprawl. Megastores undercut local
merchants and produce armies of low-paid workers. Agribusiness drives family
farms out of business and puts agriculture in the hands of corporations.
(Actually what is driving the family farm out of business is the family farm -
people in Western societies have been moving off farms for the last 800 years.) Aquaculture results in marine pollution and mixing of cultivated fish with wild
populations. Every single innovation that provides the masses with more
freedom or material goods is a target for intellectual disdain. You'd think
people who are concerned with poverty would be delighted by more abundant and
cheaper consumer goods, or that people who are concerned about hunger would be
thrilled with cheap, abundant food. Exactly the opposite. You'd think that
people who are concerned about the dichotomy between rich and poor countries
would be ecstatic over globalization and the spread of jobs to underdeveloped
countries. Surely people who are concerned about peace would glory in seeing the
leaders of the industrialized world meet to discuss how to better integrate
their economies. Yet every economic summit is besieged by protestors railing
against globalization.

One recent target of opponents of globalization is outsourcing of jobs to
Third World countries. This creates real suffering for displaced American
workers. But for years, we have heard how grossly unfair it is that the U.S. has
such a disproportionate share of the world's wealth and consumes so much of the
world's resources. Now the rest of the world is catching up. Jobs,
opportunities, and wages are moving into less developed countries, and those
countries are increasingly competing with the U.S. for markets and resources.
What did you think it would be like, people?

Most of these folks simultaneously demand government programs to alleviate
poverty and hunger, mass transit so the poor can get to where the good jobs are,
and international aid to the Third World. In short they want structured,
paternalistic programs that address needs defined by the intellectual elite.
They are bitterly opposed to innovations that merely give the masses more goods,
food, or money and leave the decision making to individuals.

First, the money has to be taken by force from the wealthy.
Voluntary contributions don't count. Taxation at a level that the wealthy
will consent to doesn't count. Any approach that recognizes the wealthy as
having rights is unsatisfactory. Even worse is any recognition of
philanthropy and the idea that some of the wealthy have social consciences.

Second, the programs can only address needs defined by the intellectual elite.
We won't provide cheaper cars; we'll force people to use mass transit. One
volunteer aid group once did a study of Third World needs, concluded that
one of the most pressing needs in Third World countries was transportation,
then excluded automobiles from consideration because they felt that
automobiles had a negative effect. When mass transit doesn't work in the
low-density U.S., we'll try to compel people to live in higher density
housing.

Finally, the distribution of resources cannot have anything to do with
individual responsibility. "From each according to his ability, to each
according to his need." In other words, if you're smart and industrious
we expect you to work for no reward.

One of the best examples of paternalism is the story of Victor Gruen, father
of the American shopping mall. Gruen envisioned recreating the central plazas of
European cities where people would gather, interact, linger and socialize. Gruen
finally returned to Austria, depressed at how the idea had turned out in
practice, and died in 1980. He apparently never figured out that Americans spend
most of the day working and the people who have the time to linger in malls are
exactly the sorts of people most likely to deter others from coming to malls.
But even more, it never occurred to Gruen, or to all the other people who
propose European style solutions to American problems, that if Americans
wanted to live like Europeans, they would already be living like Europeans.
Gruen's story leaves me uncertain whether to pity his naiveté, or feel anger at
his arrogance. What gave Gruen the right to decide that Americans need a
European lifestyle?

Here's a radical idea. If our cities are plagued by flight of the middle
class to the suburbs, why not return control of the cities to the middle
class?

The Time Ghetto

There's no more effective social filter than time. By the late 19th century,
tourism was becoming well enough established that even the middle classes could
engage in it, and it was to the advantage of railroad and steamship companies to
foster this development, just as airlines do now. So how to separate yourself
from the rabble? Well, a shopkeeper might be able to afford a round trip to
Europe, but not a six-month tour. Only the really rich could afford to travel
for six months at a stretch.

It's significant that so much intellectual disdain is targeted against any
innovation that gives the masses more time. You can always create more
goods, food, or wealth, but there are only 24 hours in a day. Uh-oh. It turns
out you can create more time. You do the routine tasks faster so you have
more time to spend doing what you want, or you drive prices down so people need
to work less time to buy things, and have more leisure to enjoy them. So it's
not surprising that virtually everything that translates into time saving is
fair game for the elitists.

Trashing Tourism

If you want world peace and understanding, I can't think of a better way to
do it than to have floods of people visiting other parts of the world. Even
given the worst stereotypes of tourists, some people at least go places, learn
things, and leave money behind. People on the other end get money, learn things
about their own culture as guides, learn other languages, and learn about other
cultures by being exposed to them. There has probably been no single greater
force for peace in Europe since World War II than the fact that millions
of Americans have lived in Germany with the U.S. Armed Forces and millions of
Germans had first-hand contact with Americans. I'm not talking about the troop
strength, just the ordinary day to day human contact.

If you have some excess wealth to spend, it's
hard to come up with a more constructive use for it than tourism. So it's natural that tourism would be
abhorrent to the intellectual elite. It gobbles up land for airports, clogs the
skies with aircraft, increases pollution, increases pressure on sensitive sites,
and so on. All of that perfectly true.

See, travel was just fine when only The Right Sort Of People had the time to
engage in it; when it took several days by train or ship to get anywhere and
when it was so expensive that only the Enlightenedcould aspire to it.
But now all the riff-raff are doing it.

First Class on the Titanic

The dream world that anti-democratic elitists inhabit is the first-class deck
on the Titanic, where people of breeding admire and subsidize the
intellectual elites. Old money only, thank you, none of that tacky nouveau
riche behavior. Not the real first class deck (Leonardo DiCaprio's
announcement that he was an artist drew sneers from most of his table mates, and
that would likely have been true in reality as well) but one that exists only in
nostalgic fantasy. Truth is there has never been a society that supported
intellectuals better than ours. Tycho Brahe may have had a lavish court, but he
was born into the nobility to begin with. If you were a peasant with a brain in
the Middle Ages, you might have gotten a break in the priesthood but that was
your only chance. In terms of number of people and level of support, nothing in
history even begins to approach how Western societies support
intellectuals.